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Sunday, 18 March 2018

A Unhappy Warnock

We have a dusting of snow overnight and Derby’s televised
match with Cardiff, scheduled for 12 noon, is bizarrely cancelled. Although I’m
well surprised that Sky that didn’t make them play it anyway. With both teams already
there and the pitch fine due to undersoil heating, who needs supporters?

Naturally Cardiff’s manager Neil Warnock isn’t happy but
then he never is. Warnock is convinced the real reason the game was cancelled was
because of Derby’s injury crisis. He’s probably right as well. The weather is
grim but hardly dangerous or life threatening. In fact everyone shrugs off the
cancellation and goes shopping instead because there’s not a jot of snow on the
main roads. The club themselves encourage everyone to come spend money in the
club shop or their restaurant instead, which are all at the stadium, work that
one out...

The really annoying thing is if Sky hadn’t moved the game to
Sunday in the first place it would have been played already!

Something else I don’t get to do today is my Velodrome
session which is also cancelled. No, not because of the weather although the
Velodrome is right next door to the football stadium, John Bishop is doing a
gig there and he doesn’t cancel.

Instead my brother and his family pop round to visit the Lad
and then in the evening, L and I go see a film.

From the novella by Jonathan Ames, comes You Were Never
Really Here. A nice family film...

Joe (Joaquin Phoenix) is a war veteran, traumatised by his past, addicted
to pain killers and a hired killer who specialises in retrieving trafficked
girls. He has a reputation for brutality but also for getting results, with his
hammer. An implement of which he has not so found childhood memories.

He spends his free time between jobs caring for his elderly
mother (Judith Roberts) and having flashbacks to his past, as a Gulf War soldier
and as the victim of an abusive father.

He is offered a large wad of cash to rescue Nina (Ekaterina
Samsonov), the 13-year-old daughter of a New York senator called Albert Votto
(Alex Manette), who is missing from home. He locates Nina in an ‘upmarket’ brothel
from where he rescues her, killing several security guards and customers on the
way.

Then before he can get Nina back to Votto, he sees on the news that Votto
has apparently killed himself. Corrupt police officers then storm his motel
room and take Nina off him. They come for him too but he escapes.

He then finds that both his boss and his handler have been murdered
in an attempt to track him down. Once they know where he lives they head there,
kill his mother and then lie in wait for him. Joe outsmarts them, kills one of
them and finds out from the other than the man behind all this is Governor
Williams (Alessandro Nivola) who wants his favourite sex slave back and has the
power to do it.

Joe gives his mother a water burial and also attempts to
drown himself, but a vision of Nina convinces him to save the girl fromWilliams instead.

This is a film where you really need to concentrate, or
revise beforehand, as the director leaves you to find your own way but it’s a
really excellent film with a great performance from Joaquin Phoenix as the man
who is never really there. Although some folk might need a blindfold as it’s a
violent film but ‘tastefully’ done with most of the bloodshed off-camera.